


Azovka

by RegalMisfortune



Series: Gibraltar Shenanigans [9]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: At Least For When I Get Around To It, Canon? What is canon?, Drabble Based On Something I Read While Browsing Folklore On Wiki, Folklore, I Am Continuing This It Seems, May or May Not Continue?, Mythology - Freeform, Supernatural Elements, Zarya's Particle Cannon Sort of Takes a Life of its Own
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-03 18:51:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12152700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RegalMisfortune/pseuds/RegalMisfortune
Summary: There was a tale, known and spoken from parent to child in the shadows of the Ural Mountains, about the woman who lived in Mount Azov.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! First drabble for Overwatch in over a month; I hope you didn't miss me too terribly. 
> 
> This is based off a folklore of the Azovka I stumbled across tiredly browsing through random Wiki pages and then I was inspired to write this, so here we are. I might continue this if people want to, but I may continue it regardless because I'm an idiot who likes taking on more projects than they should. 
> 
> Anyway, feel free to bother me on [tumblr,](http://regalmisfortune.tumblr.com/) and I hope you enjoy this little disaster!

There was a tale, known and spoken from parent to child in the shadows of the Ural Mountains, about the woman who lived in Mount Azov.

Some say she had been the queen of The Old People. Some said she had ran away from a pursuer to refuse marriage. Some said she had fallen in love with the wrong person. Sometimes they would say she would scare anyone who came upon the mountain, while others claimed she would help anyone who got themselves lost in the steep wilds.

But no matter if they mistook her soft songs of her people as moaning, or that they believed she originated from the Bashkirs, the Cossacks, or the Tartars, the outline of the tale remained the same: of a woman of exceptional beauty and gigantic height who lived within the mountain to guard and protect a treasure that only one who bears the same name as she could ever enter and claim it.

She smiled whenever the old man or woman down in the tiny mountainside town warned her of this fact, that the mountains were haunted mark their words. She would take their offered provisions with quiet grace, and make her way up the mountainside back to her lonely home within the rocks with the soft sway of her long blond hair in the breeze.

The townsperson would long be dead by the time she came back to visit, as few could live a century or more, but much longer than it ever had been before. No one would remember, but no one would forget either, even as the years went by and the world changed before her eyes from small campfires to factories of metal and coal, to horseback to automobiles to airplanes and beyond as the summers became unusually warm or unusually wet, and the winters so very, very bitter still.

Whispers of wars came and went upon the lips of the townspeople, and she did her best to soak it all in. New countries rose and fell, weapons developed and changed to kill their enemies faster- or more painfully, depending on the user’s choice. Bombs were created, grenades could be detonated to take out a small group.

But there were changes for good at well. Communications went from letters to large boxes on walls to handheld devices that did all sorts of magnificent things. Medicine advanced from herbal remedies to what would’ve been considered miracles in her original lifetime. Nations who had once been enemies were now friends. People could travel around the world in a day rather than years (when she had first heard that there were continents across the sea that she had no recollection of, she had to sit down and marvel at the very thought), and a single person could talk to a person on the other side of the planet within seconds.

It was shortly after cars gained the ability of floating and she could no longer determine the weather based on previous known patterns of centuries of observations when the hushed murmurs of another war reached her ears in the market of the still very quaint mountainside town. About robots- _omnics_ \- that were sweeping across Siberia, and that the Russian army was scrambling to keep them from scaling over the mountains and into the designated European section of Russia.

And then, one by one, families began to desert their homes, to seek refuge in the cities beyond the Urals.  Some remained, stubborn in their generations of living on the same land or optimistic in being missed by the obvious onslaught. She grew increasingly pensive as the screen on the wall above the counter showed the carnage and devastation of these omnic armies, not just in Russia but around the world. Her green eyes trailed from the screen to the others at the counter, all of whom were looking grimmer by the day.

Many of the people who remained were those who were old and set in their ways, those who could not afford to move to St. Petersburg or beyond. Shipments of supplies had dwindled in the last few weeks, the lone doctor had packed up and disappeared into the night a few days ago. Between them they had about a dozen hunting rifles, ancient in comparison to the firepower that the omnics wrought.

Her heart ached at the thought. Who would protect these people when these omnics came and there was no army to be found?

It was in the middle of one early winter night when she heard the distant grinding of gears and hisses of steam, too distant for normal humans to hear. It was then that she made her decision, fingernails biting into her palms as she rushed down the mountainside to stir awake the remaining members of the town, helping them frantically pile the scant supplies into the handful of vehicles remaining and spurned them onto the midnight escape.

They could see the fires setting the skies aglow behind them as the vehicles raced across the freshly fallen snow down ancient roads and half-forgotten footpaths through the forests and fallow fields.

Their escape ended in them running almost literally into the scraggy army of foot soldiers in the early morning twilight. She had hopped off the back of the truck she had rode in on, taken one look at the harried faces of the soldiers, and decided they needed all the help they could get.

No one knew the paths and roads of the mountains like she did. She knew each and every path that had been made and taken over by nature, every crevice and landslide was as familiar as the lines of the palm of her hand. And so she led them through the wilds, down old animal paths and winding smuggler routes, to effectively ambush the omnics that had dared to attempt to attack innocent civilians in the dead of night.

It certainly helped that she had taken hold of a massive weapon from a rolled vehicle, the device glowing and humming comfortably under her fingers as if it had been waiting for her. She knew nothing of how to shoot, how to fight, but with raw determination and passion to protect, she cleared a path through the hostile robotic entities, and by the afternoon was assisting in hunting down the routing survivors.

The army was ecstatic. Morale jumped, everyone was crying, and somewhere along the way she had grown attached to them, their young faces and eyes glinting with hope that had been devoid of the emotion for so long. And thus, she became an unofficial member of the Russian Military.

The weapon she had torn away and used turned out to be something called a particle cannon, a device that uses a whole ton of scientific jargon but can do a variety of things. She loved the particle barriers it could construct, and was amazed at the gravital surges that sucked everything near it to it, immobilizing them. To protect and disarm were things that she could admire, even if she had to use the other functions of the device to cut and tear enemies asunder. The cannon purred under her hand regardless of how she used it.

Apparently it wasn’t entirely common for anyone to lift such a weapon with their own two hands, and the men of the battalion she found herself acquainted to always took the scant downtimes to see what other things she could lift with almost childlike amazement.

It turned out that most women were not quite within her caliber in regard to height and size alike. She often stood a head above even most men, but she never quite realized how different she was within the sheltered little village far in the middle of nowhere in comparison to the rest of society. The volunteer medic at a makeshift fort told her the specifics, with a grin on her lips and hair a wild shade of electric blue that made the taller woman wonder over its color and inquire over it.

The next day she sported short hair for the first time in centuries and the familiar blond a soft shade of pink, and the entire battalion went ballistic.

They began to call her Zarya after that. One older commanding officer referred to her as Aleksandra- she reminded him of her own daughter bearing the namesake- but everyone else used Zarya, a reference to the original creator of the particle cannon who had been particularly fond of dyeing their hair. She didn’t mind. With one name she couldn’t say to anyone and no other to refer herself to, the newly appointed Zarya quite liked having something to that others could use in reference to her.

Later she would find on a set of dog tags that had been shipped to her from the government proper as some sort of surprise initiative that her full name given to her was Aleksandra Tatyana Zaryanova. It seemed that regardless of the fact that she had given no name, the country and its people were willing to give her one for her. There was no given birth year, but the date put it in the early spring, around the time when the snow was starting to melt away and the crocuses peeked their fragile petals out of the icy crystals. There was symbolism in this, she knew, but she smiled all the same and curled her fingers around the metal.  

Her image became an icon of revived hope and inspiration within the Russian people, although Zarya went blissfully unaware of that fact, cleaning what she affectionately named Mstitel', the particle cannon that took her from the fringes of the Urals to the wilds of Siberia. She was sure that it picked up a sentience of its own under her care, especially after she had given it a name. Names were powerful things, after all, and being handled by something as ancient and mythical as herself certainly sealed its fate.

The war eventually ended with the closing of the Omniums, the battle omnics shut down and/or scrapped, the entirety of Australia irradiated, and Zarya disappearing in the midst of post-war victory celebrations with Mstitel’ back to her quiet mountainside home, never to be seen by the general populace in the following years, and whispers of the woman who became a mystery renewed.

But Zarya found herself unable to ease back into the life of solitude. There was a world out there, full of knowledge, adventure, and people to protect. The seasons came and went with the increasing restlessness that no song of old could smooth away.

It was with the murmuring of increasing omnic activity and the eagerness that thrummed from within Mstitel’ that Zarya packed up her meager belongings and set out down the mountain for perhaps the last time in the century.

Time had assured that the treasure there would be protected, and Zarya had eternity to explore this world for all its worth.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote another drabble for this because... why not, I guess? Decided just to plonk them into one place instead of separate works to simplify things.  
> If I write any more, I will try to write in a coherent timeline instead of jumping all over the place, but no promises of that, nor any promises of any further works for this.

The world was much larger than she expected.

Russia itself was big, Zarya knew this, but seeing the world sprawled across glowing projections or etched onto ancient maps never could bring into perspective how _massive_ it really was until she set foot off the mountain she had called home since time forgotten.

The countryside swept past her as the truck she was riding in the back of traversed down the bumpy back roads. She had gone through Kazakhstan, or so she was sure that was what it was called from vague recollections of old road guides. A part of her wished she could go on one of those airplanes or airships or whatever they were called now, but logically there was no way she would be allowed, with no identification to go from other than her dog tags (she could remembered some of the others during the war speaking about Customs when travelling abroad, but all she really recalled was how tedious it was).

She may not know much about modern ways of doing things, but she didn’t want to cause any trouble.

Crossing borders was far easier, especially when she was on foot. Slipping over fences, climbing through the rougher wilds, using the skills she picked up from years of hunting and acceptable survival during the war to sneak by guards (or run away from them)- it was all very _thrilling_.

Mstitel’, however, wasn’t as thrilled with the aspect, having been stuffed into a large duffel bag that Zarya had found along the way. She couldn’t be seen carrying a _cannon_ , now, could she? People would get upset and she didn’t want to bother with the hassle. She made sure that it was cleaned and polished every night to make it feel better, but the grudging, grumbling purr under her palms made it very clear that it was still very much bitter about the fact that there hadn’t been any need for its use since the journey began.

The locals she bumped into were certainly friendly enough, even if the farther she went the more strange the Russian dialect became, if it existed at all. The ones who didn’t speak a lick of it took some interpretative hand gestures and drawings and some very apologetic puppy eyes on her part, but they seemed to understand readily enough to get to where she needed to go out of the goodness of their hearts.

And then she was sure she had slipped her way into China at some point, high snow-capped mountains to the west as she kept them there, going around the peaks that seem to grow higher and higher. The languages changed, people’s appearances altered, but she smiled and tried to mimic their actions as they greeted her and somehow still managed to continue onward with kindness and- surprisingly enough- just enough English that she barely picked up a few words from a fellow soldier who had originally gone into an English Major during his schooling abroad.

Zarya’s hair was only the softest of pinks now, the last dyeing of it ages ago, but she didn’t mind, and the some of those she came across were just as interested to the color as she had been when she first came across the medic with the bright blue. Then again, most stopped to stare at her because she stood a good head and sometimes shoulders higher than most, a walking mountain of a woman. It helped with the gentle persuasion of transport sometimes.

The truck pulled to a stop, but the engine continued to growl under Zarya, causing her to pull her eyes away from the scenery of the mountains and hills in order to catch the last of an exchange from the friendly driver and to see-

_An omnic._

No, _two_ omnics.

Zarya stared at them as they helped themselves up into the truck bed, her fingers instinctively curling around the cloth where one of the handles of Mstitel’ was inside the bag to ground herself with its low hum.

They were no longer at war, she reminded herself. The omnics were not friends, but there were other countries that were more open to progressing into better relationships with their past enemies from what she understood on the tiny, slightly cracked screen on the wall in the old town corner store. But she was somewhere entirely foreign, with no one but Mstitel’, and while she may be timeless, she wasn't foolish enough to pick unnecessary fights in the back of a truck that wasn't even hers.

Yet these… these _omnics_ were not like the ones she fought in the war. Those ones were big, clunky, built for firepower and defense. These two were oddly _agile_ , with the taller one slowing at the sight of her, its actions slow but very fluid, almost human-like it turned its head towards her, the green of its visor glinting in the morning light. There was a sword on its back, she noticed suddenly, her eyes flicking up to the handle. She hadn’t seen one of those in… well… it must be at least a century or two now when they were used like they were supposed to and not for wall decoration.

Zarya had a feeling that this sword wasn’t just for show.

The smaller of the two she hadn’t quite noticed, until it set its feet onto the soil and rose to stand almost at the same height as the other. She boggled at this one for a bit quite openly, trying to wrap her head around why exactly did one just suddenly _grew_ as settled down into the bed of the truck with its legs tucking nimbly under itself. It was wearing some odd sort of... robe, she could only describe it as, with huge, clunky beads around its neck as if it was some fashion statement. Perhaps it was- did omnics even have a fashion sense?

Her knuckles turned white as the other joined the first, simply knocking metal knuckles against the metal side of the truck to signal to the farmer to start driving once again. Mstitel’ rumbled against her hand in quiet warning and threat; she subtly tried to stroke her thumb against its handle through the thick fabric of the duffel to sooth it. They weren’t going to start a fight unless one of the two started something. Only for the kind farmer’s sake.

The smaller one said something, its voice holding a strange reverb to it and surprising her. She didn’t know omnics could talk. The ones during the war beeped and whistled and other simplistic noises, but this one sounded like actual words… in a language she had no clue existed. Zarya’s eyes flickered up to the nine glowing lights on its head, the color a calm blue, not the reds and eerie yellows that gazed back at her from the misting snow on the Siberian front. They flickered, only briefly like a strange multi-eyed blink while the other tilted its head closer to say something else to the oddly-garbed omnic, speaking in yet another language, this one similar to that spoken by the farmer, and yet very different.

The smaller one chuckled, and Zarya stared, dumbfounded at omnics even had the capability to do so on top of speaking.

…Maybe this is what the newer omnics were like?

That didn’t account for the wear on the smaller one’s plating, the faint bit of tarnish that was starting to form at some of the edges. At least its companion was sleeker, with metal polished smooth. Perhaps a bit too smooth, from the way the light reflected off the bits of chrome.

“-Perhaps you understand me now?”

The words in English jerked Zarya from her obvious wary gawking, her knee knocking hard against one of the sharp edges of the hidden Mstitel’ who spluttered an irritated hiss against her side.

“Oh, I meant not to startle you,” the smaller omnic added, its tone gentle and laced with concern, or perhaps whatever concern an omnic could convey that Zarya could understand between most of its words that she could not quite decipher. English wasn’t even close to being a barely moderate skill of hers.

“I... hello?” Her words came out thick, heavy with her native tongue and butchering whatever eloquence there was to the English language, her brows scrunching together as she tried to put the little knowledge she did know to work from years of negligence. “No… good?”

“I understand,” the smaller omnic replied, and Zarya couldn’t bring herself to say any more, her eyes drifting towards the scenery once again, or rather, one eye was on the landscape, the other on the pair of omnics with wariness trained into her by the months on the battlefront. She couldn’t be too careful, even if the smaller one looked fragile enough, but she was worried about the one with the sword, who was watching her with the same amount of wariness that she was giving them both.

Zarya tugged her bag subtly closer, just to let the grumbling of Mstitel’ soothe her nerves.

The rumbling of the truck was the only sound keeping them company in the back bed. Between the two maybe-enemies maybe-nots, Zarya was finding herself feeling a bit anxious. There was something about these two that felt different than any of the other encounters so far in her journey. Something _important_. It tickled the back of her mind, an inkling on her instincts, but for the life of her, no matter how endless it may be, she couldn't figure out _why_.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, Zarya's gaze gravitating towards it. The rather obnoxiously large beads that the smaller omnic had adorned around its neck were… moving. Hovering individually and rotating gently in an arc. _Like magic._

Naturally she tried to ignore it, pretenting she wasn’t completely entranced by this display of modern witchcraft.

Then again, humans _did_ make hovering cars, but she knew that regardless of how much technology _looked_ like magic, it usually never _was._ Until Mstitel’ came under her care. So maybe this _was_ magic.

… Okay, Zarya wasn’t doing a good job at ignoring the floating beads…orbs…things. She kept turning her head to look at it with both eyes, realizing what she was doing, and snapped her head back around to the scenery again, and the process continued several more times until she couldn’t stand it and had to lean forward, reaching over.

The taller omnic’s hand was up in an instant, fingers on the hilt of its sword at the sudden action, but the smaller one didn’t even twitch as she grasped around one of the orbs and plucked it from its orbit, pulling it closer to inspect with sheer wonder.

“ _What kind of sorcery is this?”_ she whispered in a very old dialect of Russian, distracted in turning the orb in her hand to make sure she was speaking a more modern tongue and not any that came between her original lifetime and the present, enthralled by this small discovery.

The orb made her fingers tingle, not quite like the purring grumbling of Mstitel’, but something more… passively intrusive. Warm, even. She wasn’t familiar with it at all, but it didn't bother her as she turned it over in her hand.

The orb itself was metallic, golden plates pieced and smoothed together with small things of softly glowing blue. Zarya ran her fingers over the odd patterns within the metal itself, and just then started a little as she felt the thing actually _hum_ under her fingertips. Not like Mstitel’, who purred, grumbled, and growled almost like a very strange cat. This orb was more like a soft song, a silent chime against her skin.

“Oh,” she breathed out, her fingers letting go of the orb as it hummed just a little more against her hold, a quiet request that she provided, watching it float up from the palm of her hand. She lowered her eyes from the orb to the strangely-dressed omnic, awe written all over her face.

“ _Is this… Omnic Sorcery?”_ she questioned in more modern Russian. This _had_ to be modern witchcraft. What else could it be? She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any _human_ shamans in centuries now, but the world was a mysterious place. Perhaps omnics were put together with a little bit a science, a little bit of magic, who knew? Certainly not her.

There was a good-humored chuckled by the smaller omnic. “ _Perhaps, perhaps not,”_ it replied cryptically back.

Zarya felt her lips curling upward despite not wanting to- to an _omnic_. “ _You are strange- especially for an omnic.”_

Omnics shot people. Killed innocents. This one was… super weird with its floating orbs and odd taste in clothes.

At his its companion was something she was more used to, with its hand _still_ on its sword, body tense and ready to strike at any second. The smaller one seemed to sense it, resting a hand on the other’s knee and saying something to it that she couldn’t understand.

Instead of replying, it merely nodded its head down the road. Behind them, another vehicle was approaching, and Zarya immediately recognized it as an armored vehicle. One similar to the one around the time when she thought she crossed the border, where she narrowly escaped being caught by some very loud, angry guards

_Well shit._

The truck they were riding was slowing down, and Zarya smiled at the other pair, this one slightly rouge-like as she subtly wrapped the strap of the bag around her hand.

“ _Well, it was nice to meet you! For omnics, that is,”_ she told them, hoisting the bag up  and over as she hopped over the edge of the truck in one fluid motion, disregarding how Mstitel’ rumbled in agitation of being so terribly mishandled as she booked it across the short expanse of grass before disappearing into the nearest copse of trees.

She hadn’t realized she had accidentally swiped the floating orb with Mstitel’s bag when she jumped off, not until she found an abandoned shack to catch her breath after escaping border patrol for the second time and found the palm-sized thing resting innocently within the crease between the zipper and the strap.

Zarya was sure she would meet them again to return it to the odd omnic. She could feel it.


End file.
